From all the furniture objects, the chair might be of the most importance. While most of the other pieces (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed makes for example the bench or sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic creation; it was also a symbol of social place. From the old royal courts there were important differences between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. From the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior rank, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair can be utilised for a range of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has designated unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has been changed to conform to changing human desires. For its unique connection with man, the chair exists to its full significance only when in employ. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and regarded best by a person using it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several areas of a chair have been labeled as the areas of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of a chair is to support a human body, its worth is valued principally from how completely it fulfills this practical use. In the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound by certain static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There are societies that had distinctive chair types, as expressive of the leading object in the arenas of handling and art. From those cultures, special note needs to be made of ancient Egypt and Greece; China; Spain and The Netherlands in the 17th century; England in the 18th century; and France in the 18th century during the ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of careful make, are today found from discoveries made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs shaped as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular form was made. There was to our knowledge no marked variation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The general difference lied in the complexity of ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed to be an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this type persevered during much later days. But the stool then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were worked of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then came again but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient item still in form but seen in a trove of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs can be visible. These curved legs were presumed to have been crafted from bent wood and were likely to have been put under a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super solid and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; quite a few statues of seated Romans display examples of a thicker and which appear to be a slightly less delicately built klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of notable uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be charted as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of drawings and works of art was kept safe, with images of the interiors and exterior of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing similarity to images of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair is designed both with and without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one type, it must be said, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms for the purpose of sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Each of the three sections had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that just to a particular extent support corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top it off) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were kept for the senior members of the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of both furniture items is stylized. The structure and aesthetic issues are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual items do not look to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks display a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of rather thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and finer examples would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won favour in large parts of the Continent, had no parallel in England. Prior to 1740, the most commonly used wood was walnut; thereafter, and for the rest of the century, it was mahogany. Walnut, though beautiful in hue, was soft and therefore less suited to wood carving than to rounded, curving forms. Outer surfaces, such as the back and seat frame, were usually veneered. During the walnut period, highly overstuffed armchairs, covered with leather or embroidered material, were also developed. The best upholstery of this period is precisely and firmly modelled and accentuated by braiding or tacks. When imports of mahogany became common, no specifically new chair designs appeared, but the character of the woodwork changed. Mahogany, having a firmer, closer grain, could be cut thinner, which meant that individual parts of the chair could be more slender in shape. Mahogany also lent itself better to carving than walnut. Carving was concentrated more on the arms and back than on the legs, which as a rule were straight and smooth with chamfered (bevelled) edges and molding. There was a wealth of variety in chairback designs, featuring elegant, pierced, vase-shaped splats or two upright posts connected by horizontal slats (ladderback).
Alongside the French Rococo chair and the best English chairs in walnut and mahogany, the stick-back chair was relatively unaffected by the stylistic changes of the day. Originally a medieval form, known, for example, from paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and still found in mid-20th century in the churches and inns of southern Europe, the stick-back chair (in all of its variations) consists basically of a solid, saddle-shaped seat into which the legs, back staves, and possibly the armrests are directly mortised. This typically peasant form underwent a renewal and a process of refinement in England and America during the 18th century. Under the name Windsor chair (a term that seems to have been used for the first time in 1731) or Philadelphia chair, it became popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In the Neoclassical period, no basic changes took place in chair forms, but legs became straight and dimensions lighter. Backs in the shape of classical vases replaced the fanciful outlines of the Rococo period. Around 1800, freely executed imitations of Greek and Roman chairs of the klismos type, with curved legs and backrest, appeared. French chairs of the Empire period, executed in dark mahogany and embellished with ornate bronze mounts, created a ponderous effect.
In cheaper versions of inferior workmanship, bourgeois chairs of the 19th century carried on the traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The only real innovations were the bentwood (wood that has been bent and shaped) chairs in beech that became popular all over the world and were still made in the 20th century. Around 1900 the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles (French and German styles characterized by organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric forms), and the Arts and Crafts movement in England (established by the English poet and decorator William Morris to reintroduce idealized standards of medieval craftsmanship), gave rise to original chair designs by Eugène Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland. These new furniture styles did not exercise wide, let alone decisive, influence. The Art Nouveau chairs designed by the French architect Hector Guimard, for example, are collector’s pieces, but his name is known to a broader public only because of his fanciful entrances to the Paris Métro.
Modern
After World War I, the Bauhaus school in Germany became a creative centre for revolutionary thinking, resulting, for example, in tubular steel chairs designed by the architects Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others. During World War II, the aircraft industry accelerated the development of laminated wood and molded plastic furniture. The dominant chair forms of this period go back to designs by Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson, and Charles and Ray Eames. Rapid technical developments, in conjunction with an ever-increasing interest in human-factors engineering, or ergonomics, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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